The December DirectX 9 SDK has been released. It apparently includes some DX10 tech previews requiring unreleased hardware and the latest beta of Windows Vista.
Ah, the joys of another version of the D3DX DLL…
Edit: Oh yes another buggy installer from your favourite Software giant! A few seconds into the installation, it halted with an error because it couldn’t find some "April 2005 SDK files". Then it started to rollback the installer, and then decided to continue installing anyway.
C’mon man, DirectX rocks quite a lot!
The new rendering pipeline is quite interesting, absolutely flexible and we may even see some true shader programming (not just the "look at this cooleffectshaderwhatever"), custom rendering pipelines. Sadly it’s a preview, no hardware 🙁
– Jikan
Yeah, it does sound pretty good, and I actually love Chuck’s note that developers should treat DX10 as a new platform and not just as an update to the previous DX.
Many developers will still be using DX9 for at least three years, and more than likely the most tech-heavy games will include versions of the graphics engine for DX9 and DX10, like it used to happen with Software / OpenGL / Direct3D back in 98. It’s simple math: Vista comes out next year (cross fingers), and it will take at least two more until games start requiring it as an operating system.
And all that is assuming that the PC remains a viable platform for high-end gaming. Casual games will be even more conservative.